Biblical and Theological Commentary on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl

(avg. read time: 16–31 mins.)

In contrast to other works of Tolkien’s translation that I have included in this series, his work on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl has no commentary of his own.¹ He intended to write such commentaries, but he never got around to doing so. He composed an introduction and lecture for Sir Gawain, as well as an essay on Pearl. Unlike with his work on Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, we are not necessarily getting insights into Tolkien’s specific theology when engaging with these works as such, particularly since we are lacking proper commentary from him. Nevertheless, being Tolkien’s works of translation, if nothing else, they fall within the purview of this series. Pearl is an explicitly theological work in its subject matter and treatment of the same, while Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has plenty of Christian elements, but it is not as thoroughly shaped by theological considerations. Tolkien also has comments to make on each that will be included below.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is particularly notable for how it handles the fusion of horizons that Tolkien examined in Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon. But this Middle English work follows what Tolkien noted was typical of Arthurian legends in imposing the explicit forms of Christianity on his material. This includes his central moral point on the ideal of knighthood: “He has re-drawn according to his own faith his ideal of knighthood, making it Christian knighthood, showing that the grace and beauty of its courtesy (which he admires) derive from the Divine generosity and grace, Heavenly Courtesy, as he calls her in Pearl” (5). Furthermore, in his work of writing this work of romance, he rejects the unchastity characteristic of the genre at the time of “courtly love” (5). In short, in Tolkien’s words,

We see the attempt to preserve the graces of ‘chivalry’ and the courtesies, while wedding them, or by wedding them, to Christian morals, to marital fidelity, and indeed married love. The noblest knight of the highest order of Chivalry refuses adultery, places hatred of sin in the last resort above all other motives, and escapes from a temptation that attacks him in the guise of courtesy through grace obtained by prayer. (8)

Throughout the poem, Gawain is presented as a moral exemplar, a man to be imitated in his thoroughgoing virtue. At the same time, being so aware of his own virtue and consumed with maintaining his honorable ways, any imperfection of his is highlighted, amplified, and certainly exaggerated in his sight. What others would regard as minor faults are to him severe failures and occasions of acquiescence to grievous sin.

Indeed, a key aspect that marks the poem as being from an era quite different to our own is not only its archaisms and medieval setting, but also the fact that its casual language and references are marked by Christendom through and through. In terms of its casual language, we see the marks of Christendom in the following ways:

“the knights most renowned after the name of Christ” (3)

“as God will me guide” (24)

“and to Christ him commended” (26; cf. 52)

“Before God, ’tis a shame that thou, lord must be lost, who art in life so noble!” (29; cf. 73)

“Sir Gawan in God’s care” (30)

“Jesus and Saint Julian, who generous are both, who had courtesy accorded him and to his cry harkened.” (33)

“Yes, by Peter” (35)

“May Christ you this repay” (35; 97; 98)

“if God will allow me … by God’s Son” (43)

“By God” (45; 50; 59; 90)

“I thank Him who on high of Heaven is Lord” (50)

“Mary reward you!” (51)

“may Christ reward you” (51)

“Now He that prospers all speech for this disport repay you!” (52)

“God bless you!” (52)

“may God reward you!” (61)

“so help me the Lord” (61)

“By Saint Gile” (65)

“unless Mary for her knight should pray” (70)

“God help me!” (71)

“By Saint John” (71)

“ere God the grace sent him” (73)

“By Christ!” (77)

“as God may permit me” (78)

“to God’s keeping they gave him” (79; cf. 90)

“as ordained by God” (80)

“may He them reward that upholds heaven on high” (82; 98)

“Christ keep this castle” (82)

“God save you!” (83)

“for the love of God, sir” (85)

“by God and all His gracious saints, so help me God and the Halidom” (85)

“but His servants true to save the Lord can well prepare” (85)

“farewell in God’s name” (86)

“By God on high I will neither grieve nor groan. With God’s will I comply. Whose protection I do own.” (86)

This is the most common way by which the fourteenth-century author anachronizes the Arthurian stories that are supposed to be set before the time in which Britain was predominately Christianized, by having their casual language reflect the casual language of a Christianized era. Blessings, well-wishes, invocations, prayer, vows, promises, and so on all have reference to God, sometimes specifically to Christ, and even Mary and the saints. There is much more religious ornamentation to this casual speech than one will find today, even among many Christians. Some of these phrases are, of course, still in use, but often in ways that are even more casual, where the forcefulness of linking the speech with reference to God is considered empty of its significance and “God” simply becomes another word. In the context of this poem, that is clearly not so.

Additionally, there are anachronistic—mostly casual—references to holidays and other features of Christendom. In the case of holidays, there are frequent references to Christmas and Christmastide (3; 13; 22; 29; 31; 38–40; 66), as well as less frequent ones to Lent (22), Michaelmas (23), All Hallows (24), Saint John’s Day and Childermas (42). As for other features of Christendom, there are references to chapels, most often the Green Chapel, throughout, as well as references to chaplains (39; 84), a priest (75), Mass/Mass-time (44; 46; 52; 56; 62; 68), and the sign of the cross (48). Indeed, not only are Gawain and the other Knights of the Round Table presented as Christians, so too is seemingly everyone else. Even the Green Knight speaks in terms of honor and worship of God in Christ. As stanzas 93–99 show, he is not a pernicious spirit, even if he is a threatening one. Indeed, when they part, Gawain and the Green Knight are said to, “clasp then and kiss and to the care give each other / of the Prince of Paradise” (99).

These features reflect an author who at least attempts to actively make his speech Christian, even to the point of imposing such things on a putatively pre-Christian world in testimony to all that he holds most sacred. This may not be sufficient for the purposes of taming the tongue, but it at least represents an intentionality to make even one’s casual speech reflect Christian belief. Furthermore, these features show a recognition that it is never enough to “sound” Christian in speech. Christian character must be inculcated and practiced. Thus, structures were put in place to inculcate intentionality of virtue through the calendar and communal practice, particularly the Mass and those who administer it. But these structures are not substitutes for individual faith, no matter how often they have been treated as such, even by corrupt religious officials who regarded their positions more like protective talismans than the weighty charges of God to those who would be judged more strictly. They are meant to be supportive of faith. As the Mass itself signifies, faith is to be participatory, taking into oneself what Christ has done, ingesting the body and blood of Christ to embody our union with him. In the same way, Gawain is not merely one who speaks like a Christian or observes all the rituals; he is one who actively practices virtue in signification of his faith.

As a token of his active living of his faith, the sign he places on his shield is the pentangle (27). It is rumored to have been a sign set by Solomon for one of his (absurdly many) marriages, and it is described as the “Endless Knot” for each line that creates the five points overlaps and links with one another. It is said to be applicable to Gawain in five fivefold ways:

First faultless was he found in his five senses,

and next in his five fingers he failed at no time,

and firmly on the Five Wounds all his faith was set

that Christ received on the cross, as the Creed tells us;

and wherever the brave man into battle was come,

on this beyond all things was his earnest thought:

that ever from the Five Joys all his valour he gained

that to Heaven’s courteous Queen once came from her Child.

For which cause the knight had in comely wise

on the inner side of his shield her image depainted,

that when he cast his eyes thither his courage never failed.

The fifth five that was used, as I find, by this knight

was free-giving and friendliness first before all,

and chastity and chivalry ever changeless and straight,

and piety surpassing all points: these perfect five

were hasped upon him harder than on any man else. (28)

Two of the five sets of five are to do with nonmoral virtue/excellence in terms of senses and dexterity. Two others show his piety by his earnest thought ever being on the five wounds of Christ that he bears the marks of even after his resurrection (the two wrists, two in the feet/ankles, and the one in his side) and by his praying through the rosary, and the last set of five is to do with moral virtues, including his aforementioned piety that is said to surpass even the other four moral virtues of generosity, friendliness, chastity, and chivalry. And indeed, in the course of the story, all of them are demonstrated in some fashion. Ultimately, it is his chivalry and chastity that are the most put to the test in the course of the story and thus, as our author would say, his piety that binds them together.

After the inciting incident, wherein the Green Knight challenges Camelot to a beheading game, and Gawain beheads the Green Knight in one stroke—only for him to pick up his own head and leave—Gawain is obligated to meet the Green Knight at the Green Chapel a year and a day later to receive a return blow. Since the inciting incident happened during Christmastide, when Gawain makes the journey, he finds himself wandering in the wilderness without anywhere to go for Christmas. What bothers him about this is not missing the festivities, but being truant from the Mass of the One “who on that selfsame night / of a maid became man our mourning to conquer” (32). Thus, he prays:

“‘I beseech thee, O Lord,

and Mary, who is the mildest mother so dear,

for some harbour where with honour I might hear the Mass

and the Matins tomorrow. This meekly I ask,

and thereto promptly I pray with Pater and Ave and Creed.’

In prayer he now did ride,

lamenting his misdeed;

he blessed him oft and cried,

‘The Cross of Christ me speed!’” (32)

He does indeed find the harbor he is looking for, as it is said that “Jesus and Saint Julian [patron saint of travelers]” harkened to his cry (33), and he attends the Mass for Christmas later on in the story. This is a keen example of how what binds together Gawain’s virtues and his concern for the same throughout this poem is fidelity. He is on his way to face the Green Knight out of fidelity to his word. His chivalry is about his fidelity to his code as a knight and thus to his liege. His chastity is about his fidelity to the call for sexual purity that marks him as a Christian (in contrast to the typical romantic hero). And his piety is his highest fidelity to his Lord and God. If he should fail in the last, as he thinks he would by failing to keep the Mass on this day, everything else about him that defines his integrity would begin to unravel.

In this part of the story, there is also an example of what I have referred to in other Tolkien commentaries (besides the ones on Beowulf, see here and here) of how “luck” can be used as a way to refer to divine providence by another name. For in parallel statements in stanza 38, the lord of the castle learns “whom luck had brought him,” but he says more specifically a little later, “God has given us of His goodness His grace now indeed, / who such a guest as Gawain has granted us to have” (38). This rather clearly indicates how interchangeable such references can be in this theological framework. It is also another illustration of how Christianized such casual speech is in this text.

As for the celebration of Christmas itself, the narrator describes the day thusly,

On the morn when every man remembers the time

that our dear Lord for our doom to die was born,

in every home wakes happiness on earth for His sake. (41)

Christmas is not just a marker of time in this story. It is a day remembered with all solemnity and joy. And though Christmas specifically celebrates the birth of Christ, we see that the reflection on it also incorporates his death. It is unclear precisely how the author understands the work of atonement here if one wishes to try to categorize him according to the typical theories of atonement. The phrase “for our doom” seems like it could be referring to a notion of substitutionary atonement, where Jesus takes on our doom in order to save us. Of course, it could also be possible to read this in a sense of the satisfaction theory that had been popular since the time of Anselm, that Jesus came to die “for” (as in “for the purpose of” or “because of”) our doom that would be ours if not for him. There is not really enough to go on here, and without extra information I do not wish to commit the fallacy of division.

Before Gawain eventually resumes his journey, he first goes to the chapel. There, the narrator says, he:

privately approached a priest, and prayed that he there

would uplift his life, that he might learn better

how his soul should be saved, when he was sent from the world.

There he cleanly confessed him and declared his misdeeds,

both the more and the less, and for mercy he begged,

to absolve him of them all he besought the good man;

and he assoiled him and made him as safe and as clean

as for Doom’s Day indeed, were it due on the morrow. (75)

As Gawain intends to be true to his word in allowing the Green Knight a stroke against his own neck, he expects he will die. Thus, he wants to attend to the matter of the assurance of his salvation. He sought for this in priestly absolution and is said to have been made clean for Judgment Day. This text represents what has often been a problem throughout the history of Christianity, especially in the medieval era that produced a number of impetuses for reformation (both the Catholic Reformation and the Protestant Reformation). That is, so much of what was supposed to be support structures for faith end up becoming distractions from the same and faith becomes misdirected. In this case, we see one of the fundamental problems that led to the emphasis on selling plenary indulgences, and thus led to Martin Luther’s criticism of them, was directing lives to penance rather than repentance. The author himself does not regard it as a problem, but for many of his contemporaries it was one they simply tried to live with, including the existential dread unbefitting those who are “in Christ,” and giving the impression that the dictates of human authorities, even those of the Church, are more immediately pertinent to the question of salvation than the foundation of it in the person and work of Christ.

All that being said, in the framework of the story, this is one of the chief actions that demonstrates Gawain’s piety and purity. Ironically, though, one of the best demonstrations of the same is how seriously he takes his fault in receiving the girdle of a woman he regarded as his lover, though there was no intercourse between them, while not knowing that she was married to the Green Knight. The Green Knight tested Gawain through her, and assured him that he passed the test by his purity. His fault in carrying on in flirtation with a married woman, and one he did not know was married at all, and in attempting to hide the girdle from the Green Knight, is one he takes more seriously than anyone else in the story. The Green Knight marks him with his axe in repaying the blow he received, but he does not seriously wound him in light of how worthy of a man Gawain has shown himself to be. As far as the tests Gawain has endured, the Green Knight assures him it is no serious problem that he has done what he has done with his wife, and so too do the Knights of the Round Table when he returns to them, as none of them agree that he was truly afflicted with cowardice and covetousness (95). Yet Gawain himself keeps the girdle as a reminder of his fault, that his virtue is not perfect, lest he become haughty.

At the same time, the Green Knight reminds him of many biblical stories where others did not fare so well as him in response to “feminine wiles”:

But no marvel it is if mad be a fool,

and by the wiles of women to woe be brought.

For even so Adam by one on earth was beguiled,

and Solomon by several, and to Samson moreover

his doom by Delilah was dealt; and David was after

blinded by Bathsheba, and he bitterly suffered. (97)

Of course, it is almost as if the Green Knight forgets that he is the one who told his wife to flirt with and attempt to seduce Gawain, so Gawain’s struggles are not only to do with feminine wiles. And to back up his point, he makes some abbreviated references to biblical stories. This list of references is the sort of text that would be full of hyperlinks were it composed today for a site like Wikipedia, that is, if it were not assuming knowledge of them on the part of the audience. Though both Adam and Eve were at fault, there has been a strong tendency in the history of interpretation to lay blame primarily on Eve, even to the point of asserting, as implied here, that she manipulated Adam into joining in her sin of disobedience by her feminine wiles. Of course, the text says no such thing. Moreover, such a reading essentially takes Adam’s word for what caused him to fail, since he pointed to the woman God gave him.

Solomon is the next in the sequence simply because he provides a more direct comparison and contrast to Adam. He is comparable in that he was beguiled by feminine wiles. He is a contrast in that he was so beguiled by many. While Solomon’s fall to idolatry is linked to taking so many wives and concubines, it is too simplistic to attribute this to feminine wiles, as these marriages secured alliances that came with all manner of other entanglements that Solomon yielded to.

With Samson, the matter is more straightforward. Throughout his story in Judges, we see that he has a weakness for women. He was so taken with a Philistine woman that he stubbornly insisted on marrying her, despite all the obvious trouble it would bring him and her, which Samson himself did nothing to quell (in fact, he did quite the opposite with all those foxes). One of his great feats of strength in removing and carrying the city gates of Gaza—which was a Philistine city at the time—happened because he was there visiting a prostitute. And then, of course, there is his whole story with Delilah, wherein she manipulates him into revealing the secret of his strength, but he was also rather dull-witted for not figuring out what was happening after all the previous failed attempts to subdue and capture him. Feminine wiles definitely played a part in his story, but he was not exactly a man well-practiced in moral virtue who was prepared to resist temptation anyway.

Then there’s the story of Bathsheba and David. Again, the history of interpretation has not been kind to Bathsheba, and because traditional readers have tended to attribute too much moral virtue to David, Bathsheba is made into a virtual Delilah or worse in this situation. But for many today, the pendulum has swung far in the other direction to where Bathsheba is presented as having no fault in this story and David’s action is effectively rape because of the disparity in power between them. I have followed both of these interpretations at some point in my life, removing agency from one person or the other, as this author does in speaking of David as passively “blinded.” But it is clear from the larger context that there is no reason to present David here as a good guy who made a mistake, since what he did afterwards to Uriah was far too purposeful and ultimately severe for that characterization, and this whole section of 2 Samuel shows that the domestic side of his life was awful because of his own failings. On the other hand, if the author wished to present this as a story of rape, he obviously had the means to do so, as there are other stories of rape in the Bible that include the use of key vocabulary, all of which is missing here, and the story of 2 Sam 11 is a contrast in this regard with the story of Amnon and Tamar in 2 Sam 13. Any reading of this text necessarily requires some inference because of how focused and abbreviated it is, but I no longer see a reason to follow either interpretation and remove agency from either one of them; both were at fault for letting this affair happen, though David’s was the more severe because of his position, duty, and purpose within God’s plan, as well as the fact that to whom more is given, more is required.

Still, the way these stories are regarded fits with the time of the author. And Gawain’s story is presented like theirs, or at least the prevailing interpretations of those stories. Except, even what he was guilty of was less severe than any of these men. That much is clear on any interpretation of the biblical stories. For all Gawain’s purity, he is not Jesus Christ. He also still needs him. And in case the overarching Christianization of this story was not clear, the last line of the last stanza attests to the gospel story and even ends with an “Amen”: “To His bliss us bring Who bore / the Crown of Thorns on brow! AMEN” (101).

Pearl

In the case of Pearl, we have a thoroughly theological work, often thought to be by the same anonymous author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien notes that there was debate that had been going on for only a couple of decades at the time he wrote about whether this poem was an elegy on the death of the author’s daughter, his “pearl,” or if it is an allegory. And while Tolkien’s distaste for allegory has been overstated, including by him, we have here one of his more illuminating statements on the subject (though I will be curious to see if the expanded volume of his letters will feature more related to this matter). For his part, he wishes to distinguish between “allegory” and “symbolism”:

it is proper, or at least useful, to limit allegory to narrative, to an account (however short) of events; and symbolism to the use of visible signs or things to represent other things or ideas. Pearls were a symbol of purity that especially appealed to the imagination of the Middle Ages (and notably of the fourteenth century); but this does not make a person who wears pearls, or even one who is called Pearl, or Margaret,² into an allegorical figure. To be an ‘allegory’ a poem must as a whole, and with fair consistency, describe in other terms some event or process; its entire narrative and all its significant details should cohere and work together to this end. There are minor allegories within Pearl; the parable of the workers in the vineyard (stanzas 42–49) is a self-contained allegory; and the opening stanzas of the poem, where the pearl slips from the poet’s hand through the grass to the ground, is an allegory in little of the child’s death and burial. But an allegorical description of an event does not make that event itself allegorical. And this initial use is only one of the many applications of the pearl symbol, intelligible if the reference of the poem is personal, incoherent if one seeks for total allegory. For there are a number of precise details in Pearl that cannot be subordinated to any general allegorical interpretation, and these details are of special importance since they relate to the central figure, the maiden of the vision, in whom, if anywhere, the allegory should be concentrated and without disturbance. (10–11)

In line with Tolkien, I treat this poem not as an allegory for which the interaction with the dead is a façade, but simply as a dream or vision—not too far removed from John and his Revelation, 4 Ezra, or the Dream of Scipio—of things to come, though in this case it is closer to the Dream of Scipio in involving a dream and focusing on life after death.

The incitement of this dream in which a man encounters a spirit from beyond the grave is that a man has lost his infant daughter, his “pearl.” The depth of his grief is known to all too many, especially in his day when infant and child mortality was much higher. The following portions from stanzas 5 and 6 signal the transition from earthly grieving to spiritual journey:

Though reason to reconcile me sought,

For my pearl there prisoned a plaint I made,

In fierce debate unmoved I fought;

Be comforted Christ Himself be made,

But in woe my will ever strove distraught.

On the flower plot I fell, methought;

Such odour through my senses shot,

I slipped and to sudden sleep was brought,

O’er that precious pearl without a spot.

From that spot my spirit sprang apace,

On the turf my body abode in trance;

My soul was gone by God’s own grace

Adventuring where marvels chance. (5–6)

He narrates the beautiful sights he sees in the course of this journey, until he arrives in the heavenly country. There, he meets a spirit adorned beyond all earthly royalty, which turns out to be his daughter (16–17). For the rest of the poem, she is the father’s interlocutor, telling him about life beyond death in accord with what he has already been taught on earth, though he was never shown such things until now. Tolkien notes about this conversation:

It has been objected that the child as seen in Heaven is not like an infant of two in appearance, speech, or manners: she addresses her father formally as sir, and shows no filial affection for him. But this is an apparition of a spirit, a soul not yet reunited with its body after the resurrection, so that theories relevant to the form and age of the glorified and risen body do not concern us. And as an immortal spirit, the maiden’s relations to the earthly man, the father of her body, are altered. She does not deny his fatherhood, and when she addresses him as sir she only uses the form of address that was customary for medieval children. (p. 17, italics original)

There was indeed much speculation in that era about spirits, their qualities, their activities, and the nature of their existence in the time between death and resurrection. Regarding the afterlife in particular, the massive appeal of the work of Dante Alighieri concerning his visions of paradise, purgatory, and hell makes rather obvious that such matters were prominent in medieval imagination.

But this does not mean that the hope for resurrection disappeared either. It was part of fundamental doctrinal education or catechesis, it was a point of proclamation, and the connection of Jesus’s resurrection with our resurrection were subjects for reflection in Eastertide. Moreover, among the scholars of the ancient and medieval ages, there was much written on the characteristics of the glorified and risen body, as Tolkien mentions, such as in works by Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Giles of Rome, among others. Still the best survey I am aware of on theology of resurrection in this time is Caroline Walker Bynum’s The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336.

As Tolkien says, in the description of the girl’s spirit (stanzas 16–20), we are not necessarily seeing the application of discussions on the nature of the resurrection body, such as for those who died as children. That is true, and we ought not to conflate the two, as the author himself did not. But I cannot help but wonder if those discussions influenced this portrayal. One can imagine in this theological framework that the spirit is being prepared for the resurrection body, and so while it is not represented as perfected apart from the body, it is still adumbrating that completion in its more mature appearance and intermediate glorification. That is, with the expectation that there is still resurrection to come, this text attempts to represent what the stage in between earthly life and resurrection life looks like for the spirit.

As the rest of the poem proceeds with the dialogue back and forth between the father and his departed daughter, we see the therapeutic role of theology. The daughter provides comfort to the father not by showing him new things in the heavens, though he does see visions that astonish and exhilarate him, but by reminding him of what is already taught by the Church on earth. When the father thinks he has been rightly reunited with his daughter and is taken with what he sees in heaven, he thinks he is to dwell here (24). But the daughter, referring to her father as “jeweller” (a metaphor established here in reference to how he speaks of her as his “pearl”), rebukes him:

I hold that jeweller worth little praise

Who well esteems what he sees with eye,

And much to blame his graceless ways

Who believes our Lord would speak a lie.

He promised faithfully your lives to raise

Though fate decreed your flesh should die;

His words as nonsense ye appraise

Who approve of naught not seen with eye;

And that presumption doth imply,

Which all good men doth ill beseem,

On tale as true ne’er to rely

Save private reason right it deem. (26)

On the one hand, her father thinks he can avoid death and skip straight to heaven, and this is something she remonstrates him for over the next few stanzas. On the other hand, he thinks what he has seen before is the ultimate destination, and she must remind him that to speak in this way is to scorn the promise of God that he would resurrect the dead. To do such is to call the Faithful One a liar, to act as if he does not plan to see this promise through to its fulfillment. Whatever else one may think of this poem, this point makes it that much more orthodox than any other purported vision of heaven (and several have emerged over the years) that does not reaffirm God’s promise of resurrection.

The biblical links become more explicit later in the poem, as the daughter cites as precedent of all the faithful being made kings and queens the parable recorded in Matthew, specifically 20:1–16, the parable of the vineyard workers (42–48). It also exemplifies the principle of God’s mercy whereby she, despite dying so young, has received such glory on par with those who lived longer than her or who have labored much longer and have not yet died (49). The language taken from this text is also used by analogy with how infants are akin to the last group hired in that they enter into the work upon their baptism (53). Baptism is also connected with Jesus’s atoning work in stanza 55:

Enow there went forth from that well

Water and blood from wounds so wide:

The blood redeemed us from pains of hell,

Of the second death the bond untied;

The water is baptism, truth to tell,

That the spear so grimly ground let glide.

It washes away the trespass fell

By which Adam drowned us in deathly tide.

No bars in the world us from Bliss divide.

In blessed hour restored, I trow,

Save those that He hath drawn aside;

And the grace of God is great enow.

Likewise, she notes the story of Jesus telling his disciples to let the little children come to him (Matt 19:13–14 // Mark 10:13–14 // Luke 18:15–16), and his teaching that his disciples must enter his kingdom like children (Matt 18:1–5 // Mark 9:33–37 // Luke 9:46–48). And indeed, she alludes to other texts besides, including Jesus’s teaching of knocking and being opened to (Matt 7:7), and the merchant who sold all he had for the pearl of great price (Matt 13:45–46).

The daughter even says that she is among the 144,000 mentioned in Rev 7:4–8 and 14:1–5 (66; 73–75). This leads to her referencing their residence in the new Jerusalem. But before she gets there, she first tells the story of what happened in the old Jerusalem, which she presents through language taken from Isa 53 and echoed in John 1:29 (67–71). Indeed, she reminds her father how Jesus blesses at every Mass with what he has done on the cross (72).

Then she ultimately leads him to the new Jerusalem, which is being kept in heaven until the time for its descent. The description of the city is taken from John’s vision in Rev 21:1–22:5 (83–90). After seeing the new Jerusalem, the procession through the same, and the Lamb himself marked by mortal wounds yet living. He saw his daughter so full of life and delight in the Lord’s presence, that he sought to join her and the others therein (96–97). But it was not his time, so he was sent back.

It is fitting to close this brief commentary on the poem by showing the culmination of its therapeutic function in directing its audience to persevere in faithfulness and trust in God in the present time:

To please that Prince, or be pardon shown,

May Christian good with ease design;

For day and night I have Him known

A God, a Lord, a Friend divine.

This chance I met on mound where prone

In grief for my pearl I would repine;

With Christ’s sweet blessing and mine own

I then to God it did resign.

May He that in form of bread and wine

By priest upheld each day one sees,

Us inmates of His house divine

Make precious pearls Himself to please.

Amen              Amen

1. The volume also includes a translation of Sir Orfeo, which I do not comment on here, as it is a British (though not Christian) reworking of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with a happy ending.

2. The name “Margaret” derives from the Latin Margarita, which is in turn derived from the Greek term translated as “pearl”: μαργαρίτης.